Social Class - where on earth do we fit?

Well, the question is, where to begin? I think I'll have to jump straight in. To my mind, money is not the class decider, though perhaps to be truly upper class you need a certain amount of money. Education is what decides class perhaps, but what if you have a PhD and are a postman or a bus driver? Maybe then  it's your birth that decides. What sort of a family were you born into? Rich, titled? Surely that is a clear indicator of class. But what if you renounced your background and possible titles and went to live in a commune, where you were self-sufficient?  And what if you were born in a council house and ended up as a professor in a university? Rare, but possible.

So what exactly defines social class? It could be a person's accent; or at least that might play a part. At university in Manchester in the 1970s, even though Manchester itself was further north than Sheffield, my home city, people, frightfully posh people, asked me to say words like look, duck, cook, put, over and over again, for their amusement at my pronunciation of the 'u' sound. Similarly with bath, path, in order to be entertained by short 'a'. I ask myself now, many years on, why I allowed this to happen. Well, there were two reasons. I wanted to be generally obliging but also the people asking me were posh and you didn't refuse posh people anything, quite simply on the grounds that they were posh and therefore superior. Now, of course, I think how stupid I was. I also do not now believe that posh people are superior.

That said, time and time again, surveys show how we are affected by a person's accent. The closer a person speaks to Received Pronunciation, the more we believe in their authority, their education, their privilege and their entitlement. Accent seems to me to be either a marker of privilege or powerlessness. What strikes me too, is that we are still allowed to mock people's accents and show  clear prejudice for or against a particular accent.  But we can no longer, and rightly so, show prejudice as to race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability or age. So why, still, does prejudice exist against accents.

There is so much to say about social class; is it determined by the goods in your trolley at the supermarket. Organic fruit and vegetables or pork pies and a loaf of white bread? The newspaper you read; The Times, The Guardian, the Daily Mail, The Sun? It's the clothes you wear, the car you drive, the children's names you choose, the films you see, the holidays you take and on and on and on.

I think I'll have to call this Blog One, otherwise I'll be writing a thesis.